Q&A: Key and Peele on Making Obama Funny

When President Obama recently met Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele — the stars of Comedy Central's sketch show Key & Peele (on Wednesday nights), in which they play Obama and his "anger translator" Luther — Obama told them he could use some anger translation for his second term. Democrats who watched the first presidential debate no doubt agree. We recently talked to both Key and Peele at Comedy Central's offices in New York City about their critics, where the election's headed, and of course, the leader of the free world.

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ESQUIRE.COM: You guys seem busy.

KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY: The best kind of busy, though.

JORDAN PEELE: They wanted to get us out through this election season, so we could get our relevant on.

ESQ: Do you film every week? How do you stay relevant?

JP: It's kind of unique, as far as sketch goes. We shoot it like a movie. We write for eleven weeks, then we shoot for about two and a half months, and then we start editing it all together and doing the live improvisational stuff. But what we are doing for this season is, at certain moments — for instance, this week, we're going to have an Obama-Luther segment responding to last week's debate. [Eds. note: You can watch that video, which will be on Wednesday night's episode, here or below.]

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ESQ: You guys met at Second City, right?

JP: Yes, though we crossed paths at Second City doing two different things. He was performing on the E.T.C. stage. I had moved to Chicago to study, then got swept away by this company Boom Chicago in Amsterdam. Those two companies were in cahoots. It's a small community, and we hit it off.

KK: I said, "Oh, a brown person. A person who looks like me. Doing improv."

ESQ: Where did the idea for the show stem from?

KK: It stemmed from unemployment.

ESQ: As most great ideas do.

KK: I was on a sitcom at CBS [Gary Unmarried], and it got canceled, and Jordan had just finished a pilot at Fox, and it didn't get picked up. Our manager said, "Would you guys like to explore doing a show together?" Why wouldn't we? We had such a good time at MADtv, we were proud of the work we came up with.

ESQ: How is this season different from the last one?

JP: This season is playful, whereas in the first season we were trying to establish what you could get with Key & Peele that you couldn't get anywhere else.

KK: We can do anything we want because we think it's funny. In the first season, we were trying to do anything that anyone else couldn't do. Let's do scenes about biracial people because we're the only biracial people we know who are sketch comedians.

ESQ: A lot of the negative reviews of the first season, including one in Salon, criticized you for making black people the butt of the joke.

KK: I think if that woman watched this season, she'd say the same thing, because the fact of the matter is, you can't do comedy unless someone is behaving badly. Otherwise, it's not a comedy. A Rage in Harlem is about a bunch of gangsters, and that's a comedy, but Color of Purple is not. It's uplifting. What kind of scene would you have us write?

JP: It would be a scene where there's a nerdy white guy and a black dude who is hitting him over the head with a sock.

KK: You're right. It would probably be something that emasculates a white person. Either emasculates them or shows we're smarter than white people are. And you know what, that's called 48 Hrs., that's called Trading Places, and that's called Beverly Hills Cop, and if you haven't noticed, those movies came out twenty-five years ago.

ESQ: Where did the idea for Obama and Luther come from?

KK: I gotta get this guy's name, but that senator who said "You lie" during one of Obama's speeches. Nope. Nobody has done anything like that to a president in the 20th century or the 21st century. So the only explanation we could come up with is, he did it because of who is holding the office. And the president has to be politically correct. He has to present himself in a particular manner. He has no choice. So wouldn't it be great if he had a surrogate who could express his frustration for him?

ESQ: Are you politics junkies or casually interested?

KK: We're both kind of apolitical. The president interests us because we share things with him culturally and racially.

JP: It's a world of lies. This one has a different feeling than the last election. Last election, it was gnawing. We loved every second. We couldn't get enough of it. This one feels like, Can we just get it over with?

ESQ: Do you think Romney has a chance?

KK: I think he has a chance.

JP: The scariest thing to me is if Obama's projected to win enough so that people won't turn out.

KK: You'd almost rather him be two points ahead, not eight points ahead, in a swing state.

ESQ: Some people think Obama doesn't make for good comedy because he's so even-tempered. But you guys have found a way to make him funny.

KK: Let's say that's a fact. Then necessity is the mother of invention. By default, you have to find a surrogate. And I think maybe we've found the right surrogate.

ESQ: Was the president actually funny when you met him?

KK: He was. He was.

JP: I wish we had more time with him. He did some comic bits with us. He said, "I do a pretty good impression of myself, too."